


Silent Raindrops

by elospock



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 14:05:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8920039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elospock/pseuds/elospock
Summary: So on the upside, Barb was still alive and everything was not lost.On the downside, though – Barb was still alive.Which meant she could still die.Which would probably happen soon.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voleuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voleuse/gifts).



**Silent Raindrops**

 

 

 

On the upside, she was still alive. That at least she knew.

 

Because Barb was fairly certain the dead didn’t feel pain. (Though, to be fair, she thought to herself, she really had no way to know.)

 

But she could sense her heart beating and her breath coming in and out of her lungs – and she was intensely aware of the pain radiating from her arm to the very core of her soul. She hoped, oh, how she hoped that the dead didn’t feel pain and that she was still alive, because thinking about never-ending pain was almost worse than being stuck in this parody of a parallel world forever.

 

Almost. Almost worse.

 

So. She was still alive. After the ordeal of the past days, it was akin to a miracle.

 

She opened her eyes, and realised that she was in what looked like a big cave, hidden from view by some branches and leaves. She was half buried under some slimy cobweb and covered with a spidery soft white substance.

 

She tried to move and then, decided against it. Wherever that _thing_ was, she really didn’t want to attract it again. She tried to see if she was bleeding or something, but couldn’t make much of anything in the thick opacity of the air.

 

Looking up, she saw a faint light in the sky, from a hole far above, the same usual faded glow that felt as though this world was forever stuck at twilight, forever stuck in the moment where shadows grew the longest and light stayed the dimmest.

 

That certainly was one thing that was uncanny about this world – the fact that it seemed to be stuck in time, like a deformed, mirrored image of the real world, where things only withered, only shriveled, and seemed to be born already dead.

 

She heard screams. They were close, but not too close. She hear them grew faint, until she didn’t hear them anymore.

 

Somehow, it was worse to not hear them.

 

Everything was so silent here. Not a good kind of silence. It was the kind of silence you wished you never heard, an empty, electrical, thick silence that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up like pine needles.

 

A silence in which you always felt observed; like something was going to go unbearably wrong, like there was an invisible sword hanging over your head, like something was hiding on the edge of your conscience, always in the corner of your eye, where you could not see it.

 

After a while, Barb decided it was safe enough to start moving, if only to look around the place she was in.

 

She must have felled on her arm when she had stumbled here. She had no clear recollections of what had happened; she remembered the pool, and a close escape. Also – running. Running in the woods, like she had never ran before, like she had never thought she could ever run in her life.

 

And then, everything had gone black. Pain. She remembered pain, a deep, cutting pain just above her eyebrows.

 

Slowly Barb reached with her good hand and felt dried blood, mixed up with earth on her forehead. There was just a little cut, but the whole area was extremely tender.

 

She tried her arm next, and realised that it was considerably swelled and awfully painful to the touch. It was definitely broken in several places, but at least, no open fractures – or none she could see. She looked at her hand next, and realised that the cut she had made trying to open the beer can in what seemed another life altogether had dried and filled with earth and the weird white stuff that was hanging in the air.

 

With cautious motions, she managed to get on her knees, but the pain shouting in her arm was almost unbearable. She fought as best as she could the nausea that overcame her.

 

Breathe in. Breathe out. That’s right, Barb, she told herself, just breathe. You can do this.

 

After a while, she looked around herself. She had lost her glasses while wrestling against the nightmarish creature, so everything was slightly fuzzy and blurry, but not too much that she couldn’t understand her surroundings, especially when they were close like this.

 

She was not prepared for the sight she discovered on her left. She froze in horror, a terrible and terrified scream catching in her throat, her heart paralysed by the deepest and rawest fear she had ever felt.

 

It was herself.

 

Tangled in the moving, snake-like shapes that were forming the left wall of this hole she had fallen into was a figure looking exactly like her – except visibly dead.

 

A dreadful shiver went down her spine.

 

How could it be her? She did feel very alive right now. She looked at her hands – it was indeed hers. Except, they were also the exact same than of the thing masquerading as her in that nest. She could see them, in tight fists.

 

But it was impossible, she thought. How could she be both dead and alive at the same time?

 

Was it just another paradox of this godforsaken world?

 

Or… maybe she was hallucinating?

 

Would she dare…?

 

Slowly, inch by inch, she brought her hand closer and closer to the other Barb’s face. She hovered over it for a few seconds before finally working up the courage to actually touch it.

 

It was cold – and very much solid too.

 

Strangely none of the slimy snakes in which the other Barb was tangled seemed to be affected by her presence right next to them.

 

It was all very uncanny. She felt like she was a ghost; but she couldn’t be. She felt very much tangible. The pain in her arm was real enough, and so were her fast heartbeats and raspy breaths.

 

She closed her eyes for a second. The whole situation made absolutely no sense. Maybe she could find a clue in her surroundings.

 

Looking up, she saw that the wall was actually much bigger than she had first imagined. She thought she had been only in a small cave, because of how she had been laying on the ground.

 

Actually. Speaking of the ground.

 

There were books on the ground.

 

She looked around her frantically, exacerbating the pain in her forehead, but she didn’t care.

 

Because – how the hell did she manage to end up in the library, of all places?

 

She looked up again, and saw that was she had thought was the open sky through branches was in fact a skylight.

 

Suddenly, she heard footsteps coming from the entrance of the building. Quickly she got back on her feet and made her way to the other side of the room, which she could now see was indeed the main library hall. As quietly as she could, she passed the rows of empty bookshelves filled with skeletons and slimy creatures. She got out through the emergency exit door at the same time as the main entrance opened.

 

But where to go next? Where could she hide? The forest seemed to be the more logical choice, because it could at least provide some shelter if she needed.

 

But it could also provide the creature more hiding places.

 

Sensing some noises behind the door next to her, she made a run for the trees.

 

So on the upside, Barb was still alive and everything was not lost.

 

On the downside, though – Barb was still alive.

 

Which meant she could still die.

 

Which would probably happen soon.

 

 

*

 

Barb didn’t know how long she had been walking in the woods. It had probably been two days since she had woken up in the library, but she couldn’t be sure. She tried to remain quiet, but she was growing more and more desperate, and more and more tired. She didn’t dare rest; the fact that she hadn’t stumbled upon the creature disturbed her more than it reassured her.

 

Also, she had been feeling a very odd feeling in the past few hours. It was as though she could feel Nancy, and it was very unsettling.

 

It was like she had been here. But she didn’t know what made her even think it. How could Nancy be there too?

 

She hoped she wasn’t at least. God, she even hoped that stupid Steve was not here. Because if they were, it meant they were trapped too, and she really didn’t wish it to anybody alive.

 

Suddenly, she tripped on a big branch she had somehow not noticed. The pain in her arm when she hit the ground cut her breath so sharply she thought she would just die right there from asphyxiation. She could only see dark spots for a while, and her head was ringing quite badly from the pain and lack of air.

 

Way to go, Barb, way to go, she thought to herself.

 

Once she recovered, there was something weird – no, different – about the atmosphere around her. It took her a while to realise that it was something she thought she would never ever feel again.

 

The smell of petrichor. Quite unmistakable.

 

And it was coming from that tree facing her.

 

She followed the smell like a lifeline. At first, she had a moment of disappointment, when she noticed that the tree was all wet and that the smell was probably emanating from it.

 

_But then a bird came out of the tree’s trunk._

 

Stunned, she pushed through the layers of slimy, gritty veins from this dead world into another, not daring to hope what she thought it meant.

 

As she was reborn into her world, she was hit by a wall of raindrops falling incessantly. She took a deep breath, the first she had in a long while.

 

 _I’m alive_ , were her last thoughts before passing out right next to tree.

 

_I’m alive._

 

Her tears were soon dissolved by the soft drops of rain dripping calmly from the beautiful, bright, grey sky.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this (first) attempt at writing a Stranger Things fic didn't disappoint you! I did enjoy writing it a lot though, and I hope you at least enjoyed it a little bit!
> 
> So. To be fair, this glimpse into a Stranger Thing AU in which Barb survives has made me want to develop further this kind of story. Because I realllllllly wish Barb had not died. I feel that her character, which is so interesting, was completely underused and died too soon. 
> 
> So. I'm very much intrigued now. I might continue this, at some point.
> 
> I kinda wanted to remain into the canon, hence the two Barbs. I love thickening a plot, and I felt that the Upside Down is such a strange and uncanny world already that it would not even be that far fetched to try this. But hey, it's also for you to decide! I welcome any feedback you might have. :) 
> 
> In any case, lovely Voleuse, I wish you to live long and prosper, and most importantly, to have a beautiful Yuletide!


End file.
